


I Stayed In The Darkness

by entanglednow



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Sensory Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 11:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/584796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You're not blind," says a very familiar voice somewhere to his left. "We're underground."</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Stayed In The Darkness

Stiles doesn't remember much before he woke up in the dark, head thumping like someone had stamped on it.

He remembers mouthing off to the sexy, scary Alpha lady. Really there had been a lot of mouthing off and smirking going on, mostly to cover the pant-wetting terror. The woman is a genuinely terrifying, psychotic bitch, and she has the fangs and the claws to back it up. In fact, Stiles isn't going to lie, he experiences a moment of shocky relief that he woke up at all. Though he's aware that there are still things possibly worse than death that could happen to him. Worse things that scary Alpha lady - name to still be determined, since she didn't introduce herself - could do to him.

He's pretty sure she's the one who smacked him hard enough to knock him out. Considering she was probably capable of smacking him hard enough to knock his head off, she had something else planned for him. That isn't reassuring at all, not even a little.

He's lying on what feels like cold gravel, and the air smells like stagnant water, metal and rotten things. Which is more than enough to tell him he's somewhere unpleasant. At first he thinks his eyes need to adjust to the light, because darkness is pretty fucking dark, and it takes you a while to pick out shapes. He's been chased through the woods at night enough times to know what that's like. But this isn't the same. Stiles blinks, then blinks again, but he can see nothing at all. This isn't the hazy, blurred darkness of being in a very dark place, or the confused, stifling darkness of waking up with something over your face. This is the total absence of any visual stimulation at all.

He's blind. He's completely blind and he can already feel his breath rasping down his throat because this isn't happening. This can't be happening to him.

"Oh my God, I'm blind," he stutters out, throat making the words panic-rough, then immediately closing off around them.

"You're not blind," says a very familiar voice somewhere to his left. "We're underground."

Stiles turns his head in the direction of Derek's voice, and encounters nothing but more darkness.

" _Derek_?"

There's the rattling shuffle of footsteps towards him, and Stiles's hand flails in the general direction of the crunching. His fingers find the rasp of stubble, and the soft edge of a mouth, before he's yanking them back in the darkness. Because he's pretty sure that putting his fingers that close to Derek's mouth, when he can't see anything, is the quickest way to get them bitten off. Or maybe Derek can see, he's a werewolf after all. He has glow in the dark eyes or something, right?

"You can see right, I mean obviously you can see, you're like, magically supernatural."

"No, I can't see." Derek is so obviously offended by the whole 'magically supernatural' thing. Which is stupid because that was a compliment. The man - werewolf - doesn't know how to take a compliment. Stiles thinks he just assumes everything is an insult.

He pulls a face at Derek, and then realises that was really stupid.

"What do you mean you can't see? Don't you have awesome werewolf senses?" Stiles has relied on Derek's awesome werewolf senses enough times to know how awesome they could be at knowing what was going on. Even when you didn't want them to.

There's a sigh that seems to be hovering in the air somewhere.

"I have incredible night vision, but my eyes don't work in pitch darkness. There has to be a light source."

"So how are you navigating your way around?"

"Sonar," Derek says flatly.

Which is - what? Seriously, what the hell?

"What? You have that?"

"No, Jesus, Stiles, don't be an idiot. I can _hear_ you."

Stiles attempts to hit him, but his waving arm hits nothing, either because Derek is a ninja, or because he wasn't anywhere close to where Stiles was aiming. Probably both, because Derek is an asshole and he gets all the superpowers, while Stiles gets knocked out and thrown into some sort of horrible underground pit just for hanging around with the wrong crowd. The fact that Derek's keeping him company in the pit of eternal misery is cold comfort. Tepid comfort at best.

He crunches in the direction of where Derek's voice came from last.

"How did you even - was it the Alpha lady, with the mean right hook and the scary eyes?"

There's an embarrassed silence.

"Aw man, she totally kicked your ass didn't she?" Stiles likes to think that the embarrassed silence is now wearing the bitchiest face of all time. "So, hey, what is this place anyway?"

"I don't know," Derek grunts out, from absolutely nowhere near where Stiles was going.

"You must have some idea. What do you think? Bomb shelter, some sort of underground water treatment thing, foundation for a building the money ran out on, ancient crypt? Throw me a bone here." Stiles snorts at his own joke, which Derek ignores, because he has no sense of humour at all. In fact Derek exhales annoyance, as if Stiles has just attempted more guesses than had even occurred to him. He's moving on the gravel again, and Stiles is doing his best to drift in his general direction. Which isn't going very well - mostly because Derek keeps moving. "How big is this place anyway, you have to know that?"

"It's a rough circle, maybe forty feet across." Derek's walking again, Stiles is starting to suspect he's avoiding him on purpose. Because he's always somewhere else right when Stiles thinks he could reach out and touch him.

"Did you pace it out? You did, didn't you? Any doors?"

There's another heavy sigh from far away to his left. Stiles starts stumbling in that direction.

"There's one on either side, and some sort of grate. There's no other way out." Derek's voice is doing strange things, like he's moving his head around while he's talking. This place echoes like a bitch.

Great, fantastic, that's the best news ever. Stiles takes a deep breath, and that doesn't help at all.

"So we find a way out, right, we force one of the doors?"

"You think I didn't already try that?" Derek says roughly somewhere closer and to his left. Is he teleporting or something? "I'm not an idiot."

"Then we force the grate, see where it goes." Stiles is flailing again. He doesn't like the fact that he has no idea how close he is to a wall. He doesn't know if Derek was lying, there might not be any walls. Or he might have missed a giant hole in the middle of the room, some sort of sheer drop into an even deeper shaft. Some bottomless pit or something.

Jesus.

Stiles blinks, blinks again.

"God, this is horrible, it's like my eyes know that it's completely dark but my brain keeps trying to find something to focus on. There's literally nothing there, and yet I keep convincing myself if I just _look_ hard enough. This is one of those psychological experiments isn't it. Like, if you stare at anything for long enough you see a face, because your brain is conditioned to look for faces."

He rubs at his eyes, and stumbles carefully in the direction he last heard Derek moving.

"So even when there aren't any focal points at all your brain is still going 'faces, faces, faces' and suddenly you're in a pitch black room and that's all you can think about, you know? And if you get no stimuli at all then your brain just starts making shit up. Am I going to start seeing things in the darkness? Because I would like to say right now that I am really not up for that. I would like to nix the 'hallucinating in the darkness' plan right now."

There's nothing but silence.

"Derek?"

There's no answer.

"Derek? _Derek_?" Stiles's heartbeat jumps, jumps again, then stops climbing gradually and just goes for sprinting in his chest.

"What?" Derek says stiffly, from somewhere behind his left shoulder.

"Dude, _I can't hear you_." Stiles says, angry now, because this is a situation where it would be great if Derek wasn't being a dick for once. It's good that Stiles is angry though, anger's doing a pretty awesome job of covering up everything else he's feeling right now. "I can't smell you, I can't sense that you've wandered off. It's like I'm by myself in the dark, so if you're going to wander around could you be louder or something, talk, make boot noises, something? I know it's against your personal code of lurkdom and badassery, but could you just fucking try, please. So I don't feel like I'm here all by myself."

Stiles is walking too fast and the floor isn't even, he stumbles on a loose patch of gravel and goes down, knees smashing into the ground.

"Jesus."

Derek's hands are on him, before he even knew he was close, pulling him to his feet.

"I'm sorry." It's quiet and confused, like Derek has no idea how to cope with Stiles freaking out over the fact that nothing's hurt them yet. It does a great job of making Stiles feel extra specially pathetic. He pushes Derek's hands away, before he's fully stable.

"Look, I know how to control my own stupid body. I'm not going to freak out and go insane, it's just - just - "

An arm smacks into his, and Derek's fingers grip his forearm, slide down and circle his wrist.

"Calm down," Derek says quietly.

"I am calm," Stiles grinds out.

"No, you're not. I can hear your heartbeat, remember."

"Then stop listening. What, I can't have a panic attack in peace? You have to super-sense your way into my entire life?" There are hands on his biceps, holding tighter than is really warranted. It's a second of grounding relief, before he's shaking them off. There's not enough air in the room, or there's too much, too much darkness and it feels like it's suffocating him. He knows that's insane, he does. But he can't stop feeling it.

"You're impossible," Derek hisses, from very close, and then there's a thumb pressing against Stiles's cheek, running across his jaw, finding his mouth.

Fuck.

_Fuck_.

Derek is kissing him.

Derek's mouth is pressed down tight against his own, all soft lips and faint scrape of stumble. It's warm, and then wet, and Stiles is officially a participant in his first kiss ever. Though he still has no idea why it's happening. He would question, he would question the hell out of this. But Derek's hand is warm on the side of his face, and he's breathing into Stiles's mouth, and no one ever told him about that part of kissing. The way he can feel all of it. The way it's so _personal_. He's adjusting his feet, tilting his head, losing Derek's mouth in the dark.

"Oh my God," Stiles says, and then presses them back together again, crooked, and a little messy, but he's taking Derek kissing him first as permission.

There's a stuttered pause, a second of surprised pressure, and then Derek's slipping away, feet churning on gravel.

"Don't," Derek says quietly. "I shouldn't have done that."

Stiles gives a shaky little laugh.

"Are you crazy, that was - I actually forgot we were trapped underground for a second. You should be preening or something, in your manly awesome, in your ability to sledgehammer all the words out of my brain with your mouth." Stiles hands are moving on Derek's jacket, squashing it between his fingers, and Derek isn't even stopping him. "That's probably the craziest thing you've ever done. This is your equivalent of panicking and winging it, with no idea whether it's a good idea or not, isn't it? I don't know whether to find that hilarious or be incredibly flattered that you had your moment of insanity with me."

"Shut up."

"You can't just kiss me and then tell me to shut up," Stiles complains. "You kissed me - oh my God, you kissed me, in an underground pit, in the dark." Why is he not surprised that Derek is going to leave him with some very strange and unusual kinks.

Derek has gone very quiet. Stiles panics and reaches out, because he thinks for a second that Derek has wandered off again. But no, he gets his fingers in soft leather, and exhales, shakily.

"I shouldn't have done it," Derek says again, but softer this time, and he doesn't try and pull away when Stiles finds his mouth in the dark with his fingers, when he leans in and kisses him again. Mostly on his own, clumsy now, but then Derek's helping, all fingers along his jaw, and tongue and teeth. This definitely isn't the sort of kiss you can call an accident, and it's pretty amazing. Stiles knows it's only happening because they're in complete darkness. There's no way he'd be brave enough to do this if he could see Derek's face.

When he pulls back Stiles is breathing heavy but slow, quiet.

"We're going to force the grate," he decides. "We're going to get it open somehow."

Derek exhales against his throat, it feels a lot like a sigh.

"We're going to climb through it, see where it goes, get out into the light. Try not to go dramatically blind in the daylight. Escape in some sort of badass way. Because that's what we do, we rescue each other, that's our thing. So I figure this one we can do together. So no one has to take a turn."

"You really think it'll be that easy?" Derek says, because life keeps kicking him when he's down, and he expects everything to be hard. Stiles thinks sometimes he makes it hard and doesn't even realise.

"Yes," Stiles assures him. "And then you'll kiss me when I can see your face."

" _Stiles_."

"Dude, I'm not rescuing us if I get nothing." Stiles knows by the noise Derek makes that he's wearing that scrunched-up face, the one he wears a second before he ungraciously gives in. That one is Stiles's favourite.

"If you get us killed you get nothing," Derek says eventually.

 

 

 

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] I Stayed In The Darkness](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1186102) by [Unread](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unread/pseuds/Unread)




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